People write bad-performing code not because it's easier, it's because they don't know how to do it better or don't care.
Repeating things like "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and "it's cheaper to get a bigger machine than dev time" are bad because people stop caring about it and stop doing it and, if we don't do it, it's always going to be a hard and time-consuming task.
Even zoom, used to be very efficient, but has gradually got worse over time :-(
How many software projects have you seen fail because it couldn't run fast enough or used too many resources? Personally, I've never seen it. I'm sure it exists, but I can't imagine it's a common occurrence. I've rewritten systems because they grew and needed perf upgrades to continue working, but this was always something the business knew, planned for and accepted as a strategy for success. The project may have been less successful if it had been written with performance in mind from the beginning.
With that in mind, I can't think of many things less appropriate to keep in your mind as a first class concern when building software than performance and optimization. Sure, as you gain experience in your software stack you'll naturally be able to optimize, but since it will possibly never be the reason your projects fail and presumably your job is to ensure success of some project, then it follows that you should prioritize other things strongly over optimization.
This is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Just because an app is slow doesn't mean Rust would've made it faster. It may just be slow because of a bad query or otherwise poor architecture, especially in web development. The commenter is asking what projects you've seen fail because the language itself hit a performance limit that couldn't be worked around.
I'll take a fast food job for 40 hours any day of the week over most of the options in poor countries. Sure, nothing but the best, fulfilling jobs for everyone is ideal, but until I see that exist I'm not informed enough to know whether it's possible outside of someones political ideals.
This has always been a poor argument.
